I’m always amazed at people who think that bloggers mostly write about their personal life.

Think about how often you’ve heard someone say, “why would I want to blog? I don’t care about what someone at for breakfast.”

What’s often missed in statements like this is that blogging isn’t just about sharing your personal life. It’s also about sharing your business.

Unlike a traditional, static website however, a blog – or as I like to call it a personal publishing system – gives you the opportunity to connect directly with other people. People who may be in your target audience. Or peers and others who gain something from reading your posts.

But a blog is more than another medium for connecting with people in your target audience and peers. It also provides a platform to engage in conversation. Those conversations can lead to relationships. And those relationships can lead to increased business.

Imagine if you developed subdivisions and built houses for a living. What would it be like if you built a bunch of beautiful homes complete with garages and drives, but didn’t build the streets that connect them? How could you possibly sell all your homes and develop a thriving community if people couldn’t get in and out of their homes?

Sounds sort of crazy, huh? No one in their right mind would ever conceive building a neighborhood or developing a community that wasn’t linked with ways to get in and out. In essence, without houses being connected by sidewalks and streets, there would be no community all – just a bunch of unreachable, free-standing (and empty) homes.

Well, if your website isn’t developing a community around it, then you’re not thinking too differently than the subdivision developer who doesn’t build streets. And if you’re not building community around your website, then it’s likely your business is suffering online.

Want To Increase Sales? There’s almost limitless methods for doing so. And all those methods boil down to one thing:

Be in front of your audience when they need you.

That’s it. That’s the key to increasing your sales. Think about it, when you’re at a restaurant, do you care with the bathroom is? Not til you need it, right? Or an ATM. You likely pass dozens of them every day and don’t notice them, right? But what happens when you’re out of cash? Every ATM comes into focus. What’s more, you might scurry to find one.

So many small business owners don’t consider this when they market their business. They work hard on their vision and business plan. Then they focus on their offer and how best to communicate that offer to a target market. Ideally, they’re wanting to position themselves as an expert in a select niche market.

But no one cares that you’re an expert until they need an expert. In other words, no one cares that you can solve a set a problems until they are faced with those set of problems. Then, they go out and look for a solution.

Think about it…you put up a few pages of text on a website and you have the potential for a business. People can view your site, read your copy and decide if they want to work with you. And blogs make it even more magical. You can easily write more content and your visitors can engage you and create conversation – increasing the possibilities that they might work with you.

Yet while the internet is magical, for many it provides false hope. So many business owners and service providers believe that simply having a website or blog alone will generate more clients. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Launching a blog or website – on its own – may not change your business at all.

Doesn’t matter whether you sell products or pitch a service – you probably want more clients, customers, buyers, patrons, consumers, subscribers, users, etc. Doesn’t matter what you call them – you’d like more.

After all, doesn’t more subscribers equal more people to market too? More patrons mean increasing sales? And increased sales equals more revenue. Isn’t that how it works?

Most of us know that. Yet many business owners set their focus too strongly on increasing revenue. They spend their time, their energy and their resources focused on making more money. And so they become like a hamster running around the wheel of trying to increase their profits – often, getting nowhere.

But what if you took some of that time to build relationships with your clients and customers? What if you took some time to build relationships with some of your leads? Better yet, what if you spent some time and resources to build relationships with other business owners? Businesses that compliment yours in one way or another. Or grew relationships with other business owners you have other interests in common with? What could happen?

What Clients Say...

Dawud is SO MUCH MORE than a website designer and coach!

Dawud is SO MUCH MORE than a website designer and coach! I love my new website and have improved my marketing approach significantly as a result of his coaching. However, it is his business acumen and timely advice that have added unanticipate...